Merge out of sync feature branch with unsolvable conflicts to master

Question

I know this probably should never happen:( but the reality is I have a master branch has some initial features of a smoke test, which is currently live on a site to for real clients to testing. Then the team plans to adds more features to the smoke test. I have been actively working on the new feature branch, let's call it feature-branch .

The feature-branch requires auth and more complex logic than master. I couldn't sync feature-branch with master while developing on it as updates on master will auto-deployed to live testing and we don't want to do that until the security is perfect.

Now the feature-branch is pretty much ready, however, the extra features caused dramatically changes on the code. I plan to merge this feature-branch to master to deliver the features added.

I expect there will be huge amount of conflicts, some of which would be hard to resolve. Luckily the major conflicts are only in a couple of files.

Is there a way to "overwrite" the master branch with this feature-branch while we keep the previous commit records of master branch?

Answer 1

I suggest that you pull the master branch to your feature-branch, resolve possible conflicts. At this point you can make a pull request or simply push your feature branch to the master. All,your previous commit on the master branch will still be present. VCS are meant for that